The Book of Heaven: A Novel (38 page)

No one could guess how long he might persist in this state; three of his staff deputized for him, making gubernatorial decisions as they would never before have dared.

It was equally unthinkable that anyone would call for Jarre's resignation; the awe in which he was still held, and pity for his suffering, kept him in his seat. So his deputies presented their acts and policies as his, and scrupulously reported to him on the authority they had exercised in his name, to which he seemed indifferent.

There was also at that time a welling up of strange phenomena, offshoots of the upheaval undergone by the Peninsula, which they did not report. Bizarre graffiti had been appearing scratched on dusty tiles, on the inner walls of houses undergoing reconstruction, on the smooth surfaces of rocks, mounded by the wave or by workmen.

They were mostly images of birds: birds without wings in flight, birds without wings flying with arrows in their breasts, birds in flight whose wings had been replaced in some fanciful way. I remember two in particular: one showed a bird with flaming torches substituted for the wings, and the other, even more bizarrely, a bird whose outstretched wings were trees, utterly reversing the conventional relationship of bird to tree.

As soon as they were effaced, similar images appeared—one of the quotidian annoyances most galling to public officials. Other images and then slogans cropped up, in other quarters. Empty wineglasses were suspended over certain streets, hung from ribbons printed with the legend, “We are parched.”

This was a legend that appeared again in rather handsome leaflets one would find blowing about the streets. These were painted with what looked like a full moon. One half of the moon was a barren desert, while the half above was painted a magnificent garden blooming under a mist of spring rain. The streets proliferated with images of roses, their petals sparkling with crystalline drops, over slogans like “Let us flower” or “We flower.”

The three deputies took little note of the images at the beginning. They seemed to appear at random times and places, and were regarded as a nuisance rather than a threat. More than anything, they seemed to be stifled outcries by the poor or newly impoverished, pleas for swift relief from the civic authorities. They avoided discussing much more significant matters with Jarre; to bring up these folkloric laments of the poor would be to record the whimpering of the puppies abandoned in the outskirts.

Even when the images began to appear more steadily, suggesting more hands cooperating, no one paid much attention.

The Paradise Nebula, that constellation of disappearing and reappearing stars, unseen for generations, had appeared in the night skies. Along the coast, people sat on the shore and along the cliffs, and watched the breathtaking theater of stars. Some wept when the stars disappeared, and gasped as they took shape again, emerging out of the darkness in new forms. Many took the constellation as a divine consolation, a sign of a heavenly covenant with the drowned. It was likely that this rare celestial apparition was stimulating the production of the images and messages in the capital; the roses, birds, and wineglasses expressing some poignant wish for contact with the dead.

Within months, though, governors of other districts were reporting sightings of similar slogans and pictures in their own territories. The pictures multiplied, but the makers remained invisible. At that point, the deputies decided the matter warranted more exploration, that our eyes should do more than appreciate the art bestowed on us.

I had been reluctant to leave General Jarre's side—he needed me to lean on while he learned to manage his artificial leg, and occasionally, when he was exhausted, I would even carry him up and down, enduring his harsh reproofs and commands. I understood that he needed me to feel the whip; I was to carry him like a battle horse, not like a nurse.

Now, though, there were discussions about returning to my regular circuits among the Houses of the Immortals. They had been neglected during the period after the tidal wave, when the port traffic was so disrupted. What seemed a wise idea became more urgent after an incident involving General Jarre's still uninhabitable villa.

One morning, we woke to discover its walls nearly covered with images of wingless birds, its intact ceilings, floors, and doorways flecked with drops of silver paint that looked like falling rain. When the four Supreme Judges left their separate residences that day for court, they were drenched with torrents of water mixed with silver paper pouring from buckets ingeniously poised over their doors. They took their seats in court that day with stray flecks of silver glinting in their hair and on their shoulders, a furtive silver like the eyes of animals peering out from underbrush.

The artists seemed to have passed from cryptic complaint to childish prank, but no one advanced a convincing theory about their purpose. Jarre remained indifferent. “To deface my house,” he told me, “is to add a bruise to a corpse.” Nevertheless, the triumvirate of deputies sent a number of us back into the field without informing him.

I went with young Pekrin to my old district, the villages and the two substantial towns on the cliffs above the port, where Madam still nominally presided over the most exclusive House of Immortals in the vicinity.

Her brides had always been drawn from the most influential families. It was natural to wonder if her house, which had been one of the centers of the Immortal rebellion, harbored any leftover dissidents or sympathizers. An informer we had relied on in the past told us he had heard rumors of buried treasure, but had nothing more concrete to offer us.

We thought at first the rumors must refer to the looting that had inevitably occurred in the wake of the tidal wave; these particular troublemakers, though, seemed to have a political purpose. Their graffiti was exhorting others to thievery; they must be storing their takings to rebuild their shattered movement.

I found Madam herself in even worse condition than General Jarre. Though she had suffered nothing so devastating as his losses, she seemed to me unhinged, perhaps by the tidal wave, perhaps because of the disgrace Rain's execution had brought to her and her impeccably managed house. She kept to her bedroom, no longer able to involve herself in the day-to-day administration of the house. She was said to have grown grotesquely fat.

I was told she now often failed to recognize the faces of those she had worked with for years, so I was prepared for her to be confused, when the new governess discreetly left us alone in her room. However, I saw in her eyes that she recognized me at once. She knew exactly who I was. She screamed when she saw me as if I were someone who had come to kill her. “She's dead! She's dead!” Then she screamed again, “She's alive! She's alive!”

“Who is alive and who is dead?” I said in the most hypnotic tones I could muster to soothe her before she created a panic or made anyone think I was hurting her. “Both of them! Rain,” she answered. “She doesn't die! Azura doesn't die! But my daughter dies. My child is dead.” She began to weep and writhe under her covers.

“These are absurd fantasies,” I said to her, creating a tone of voice as an actor does, this time of reassuring paternal ridicule and teasing warmth. I said gently, “You are suffering for a dream daughter. You have never been a mother. And you were standing near me when we saw Rain executed. She leapt from the Cliff of the Condemned, and died. You dream about her, and in your nervous state, take the dreams for reality.”

“I see her,” Madam said.

“I'm sure you do see her,” I said, “but she is not alive. No human being could have survived that fall.”

Madam grew silent, and calmer. “Now let me tell you what I have been asked to do here,” I said, glad to turn the conversation to something concrete, instead of hallucinations.

After I explained, I had Madam send for the acting governess, a self-possessed, wiry woman, who had previously been responsible for the vineyards, and was said even at her age to be able to prune and crucify the tough arms of the vines into the shapes of intense beseeching that made them yield the finest grapes. Her work was recognizable; her vines looked like ascetics in postures of prayer. She looked like a gnarled vine herself, and had capably taken on the task of the daily administration of the entire compound.

The house, like all the residences of the Immortals, was quieter than before the wave. Many men had died, many had less money to spend, and the traffic of ships in and out of port had still not attained its previous levels. The courtyards were full of refugees whose houses had been destroyed along the coast, and in the lower villages.

Among the refugees were a number who had inherited the kiss of Rain, and survived because of it, or so they believed; they seemed to have no view of her conspiracy. They were only grateful for the miracle that had happened to them. They watched intently at night as the dance troupe continued to perform the repertory of dances she had created, veined with Rain's experience of cruelty and grace, as if they were trying to understand whose breath they now held in their lungs, from whom they had been reborn.

The brides had retreated into the children's quarters, now silent, after Rain, Grail, and whoever else had helped them had dispersed the children to whatever fates awaited them outside the gates, across the borders, on other shores. Not one of them was recovered, to my knowledge. A generation of Immortal children had been lost.

Their mothers protested that they had known nothing of Rain's vainglorious plan to rescue the children, and spoke bitterly of having been cheated of the fruits of their labor, the one joy of life as an Immortal bride, and the one hope of security among the aging. But that, of course, could not have been as true as they uniformly insisted. Not one child remained with its mother. There must have been some kind of pact.

Three kinds of beings can never be suppressed in human life: the informer, always hidden in the crowd to ensure that no secret goes unknown; the torturer, always ready to practice his unique physical intimacies on behalf of his beliefs; and the seeker after love, whose vulnerability often renders the first two superfluous. It was among the third group that we were able to recruit the unwitting dreamer whose sweet hopes cradled the knowledge we were seeking.

Sheaf was the youngest of the child-bearers among the Immortal brides. Her son had been eight months old—and her first child—when Rain had led the groups of children over the mountain passes, and down to the ships waiting to take them off the Peninsula to other lands.

I sent young Pekrin toward her whenever there was an opportunity. She was quite pretty, and it was also clear that Pekrin's ambition to serve the state would keep his attraction to her purposeful and in proportion. He was like the lord of a great inheritance, hunting a bird. The bird thought its nest was its refuge, but the nest was situated on the lord's own property, bounded by limits the bird could not recognize.

It did not take long for Sheaf to confide in him. She told him she had been promised by Rain that the selfless action of sending the boy from the Peninsula would deliver him from a youth enslaved to the clients, and a maturity as a jailor both of his own mother, and of the next generation. The brides swore to Rain that if she succeeded in freeing their children, they would do everything in their power not to bear children into the life of the houses.

So Sheaf had agreed to send the boy to freedom with the other children, but instead of exaltation, she now felt aimless longing. She had made her sacrifice of the child, but not of herself. She had failed at becoming selfless.

In reality, in herself, she wanted the boy back no matter what would have happened to him. His life was her life. She wanted love more than what is called the good; she wanted the flesh of the child fragrant in her arms, and the music of his prattling more than any other future. She mourned him inconsolably. She wanted young Pekrin to make her another one. I gave him permission.

And yet Sheaf hesitated, though Pekrin had been given a rare privilege, and granted enough money to make her exclusively his. She asked him to allow her to wait forty days, apparently to make some sort of personal feminine expiation, to the lost child. Pekrin, with admirable cunning, and utterly without my advice, agreed.

But he was careful to insist that only hours filled with her company and conversation could ease his deprivation during this period. He treated this interval as a courtship, an irresistible seduction for a bride, accustomed to being given for the asking.

“I want to know everything about your life here,” he told her. “Where you walk, where you pray, where you think, wherever you are your most true self.”

To be treasured like this was to reenact in some fashion her experience with her child, but this time without sacrifice. Now she herself was the child, but cocooned securely, shielded from loss or painful choice. Pekrin relentlessly gave her what she needed, mixing like a chemist the elements of human love, with its strange proportions of ever false and ever true.

She even received him in her private quarters, though this had by previous custom been forbidden. No client was ever permitted to enter the sections where the children were housed. But now, Sheaf thought, it cannot matter. There are no more children.

She did not understand, nor did Pekrin, that there are always children where women are, that there are always children where men are. And the more invisible the children are, the more haunting their presence.

Adults carry the child they once were inside them into death itself. The unseen, undying child who accompanies them is like a candle whose light they cannot see by, but which cannot be extinguished. The first self they were before they believed in death is what they understand of immortality. For this reason, no man has ever truly known whether he is mortal or not, even though each understands that death comes to all.

So Sheaf, against all her training, trusted like a child, much as she had trusted Rain, and young Pekrin, against all his rigorous training, played like one.